Mid-term grades came out today, and there were no surprises. There have been previous semesters where I don’t really know how I’m doing until I’m pleasantly (or unpleasantly) surprised by my mid-term grade (I’ve never really been an academic perfectionist, and this has been particularly true in college), but this semester, I was pretty sure that my grades would reflect the effort I’ve been putting into my classes. Being able to do my business applications assignments for the week in about an hour at the library works a lot better for my underdeveloped study skills and inconsistent motivation than the much more open-ended assignments for my writing class (which I believe I’ve written about here before). Now I don’t know why I didn’t just suck it up and do most of the assignments for the first half of the semester, but a very consistent theme in my education, since at least kindergarten, is that I have a low opinion of and interest in anything that seems stupid, which is effectively synonymous with anything I’ve already learned.

My favorite example of this, probably because it’s the one I remember best, is learning how to round numbers. I remember learning how to round in second grade, and then every year after that it was practiced until some time in junior high, when we finally started moving on to more challenging material as the base line. Place value was another frequent offender – we started learning about it in, what, like first grade? And then it was covered again, on a slightly deeper level, every year after that until, like I said, somewhere in junior high or early high school when I started taking algebra math classes became more challenging (or at least less frustrating and tedious).

In retrospect, is there a way to write anything like this and not sound like a conceited jerk? I think math has always been my weakest subject, but I would rather do trigonometry than one more assignment in this stupid writing class.

Similarly, relating back to college, the stress related to this writing class today is giving me flashbacks to the spring 2010 semester, when I had a very similar problem after not attending the equivalent writing class at my first university (as well as losing interest in most of my other classes).

In retrospect, I probably should have taken this class in a classroom, but for some reason I thought taking it online would be easier. As it is, I’ll have to either see what I can salvage or drop it and take this damned class for the fourth time, if I absolutely must. Now I should probably do something to get away from the computer and de-stress, but nothing is currently presenting itself as a solution that won’t result in me thinking about this idiocy and being stressed.